Dust off your television. Attend a Super Bowl XLVIII party. Throw one. Make vegan snacks. Make anti-capitalist pamphlets with colorful pictures of the Seattle Seahawks... or, I mean, the 99%. Find a good sports bar and subvert it. Occupy football language. Insert slogans. Be quick with your facts. Start conversations. Who is your team? “The 99%”. You want to see Denver... I mean the 1%, go down in a ball of flames and left behind crying on the football field when the night ends. Invite your dad over to watch the game. Invite co-workers. Neighbors. Tell them about the battle between the 99% and the 1%

The game of American football is beautiful as movement and strategy, a slow but dramatic event, and I understand why fans are driven to support the games year after year. On a deeper level, Super Bowl XLVIII symbolizes the contest between the 1%—who have only increased their monopoly over a corrupt 30 year reign—and the 99%—a fractious mass of everyone else increasingly unified around calls for economic justice.

Occupy does not need to claim, redefine or save football. Occupy needs to hijack the event’s meaning. Our movement can’t afford commercial airtime to address the world directly, so we must run interference and attack dominant culture at the level of imagination.

Occupy should hijack the meaning of Super Bowl XLVIII. One team will represent the 1%. One team will represent the 99%. We will invade every living room, every tailgate party and every sports bar. Refuse to use the words “Seattle” and “Denver”. Drive Super Bowl fans mad while insisting on a real conversation about economic violence.

Does Denver or Seattle deserve the label “home of the 99%”?

All NFL teams declare themselves representatives of their cities. We need to know which city - Denver or Seattle - most represents the people over profits. Super Bowl’s are advertised as contests between cities. We also need to consider which team most represents the people over profits.

I chose the Seattle Seahawks as the true Occupy team. As a city and as a team, Seattle comes closer to what we want in an advocate for economic justice. You could choose Denver. Either way, we can create conversations around this single event but let me tell you why I chose Seattle.

Seattle’s team is the game’s underdog. Denver’s team is a football dynasty. Seattle is a defensive team. To play defense well, players have to work for each other. A defensive position is a defiant position. Denver has long been an offensive team featuring star quarterbacks and crowd pleasing acrobatics. Teams with spectacular offenses are favored by corporate America. Smiling quarterbacks sell products well. Offensive players tend to earn more than defensive players. Denver’s quarterback, Peyton Manning, makes $15,000,000 each year from his team salary. His Seattle counterpart, Russell Wilson, “makes just 3.5 percent of Manning’s base salary”.

I think we have the team of the 99%. Occupy, our team is: Seattle.

Super Bowls, of course, are commercial spectacles aired more the delivery of television ads than love of the game. Football purists often say they don’t like the Super Bowl. It is too commercial. It is also a perfect target.

A Super Bowl’s ending - which fades as it replays across mainstream media until it is forgotten - always marks a new Spring to be remembered.

A pep talk for the 99%...

“We are in hell right now... Believe me. And we can stay here and get the shit kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light… One inch, at a time… The inches we need are everywhere around us… either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That's football occupy… That's all it is.”

Damien Crisp is an artist, writer and activist. He has lived in New York City, Guadalajara. Mexico, and currently lives in southeast Tennessee. His writings can be followed on social media, blogs, and have been re-published widely online. He was a body, voice and citizen journalist during Occupy Wall Street's time at Zuccotti Park, as well as a coordinator for Occupy Sandy. His artwork includes painting, photography, installation, objects, text and video. He graduated from the University of Tennessee's painting program at Knoxville in 2005, and received his MFA from the School Of Visual Arts in New York in 2007.

9 Comments

With all due respect, you are stretching things quite a bit. Players in the NFL live about 20 years less than the average American Man. And they play an average of less than three years in their careers. All the teams are owned by greedy owners who profit off their player's shortened lives. This fact is finally coming out of the closet, and I expect to see more negative publicity on this topic in the coming years. Those of us that are football fans--and I am one--need to be informed as to the consequences of this basically gladiatorial sport. Worse than boxing, in many respects.

OK - YAY - let us hope that we could take the game as an omen/prophecy of the near ( current times ? ) future.

It went GR8 for the 99%. The 1% sabotaged themselves in the opening of the game launching the economy backwards over their own heads where the 99% scored a safety - from there the 1% took a continuous beating from the 99% as the game plan of the 1% failed and failed and failed........................ damn the 1% didn't remain scoreless though as they snuck in on another farm bill...............

Boy, you guys are way off if you think Pete Carroll stands for a socialistic form of government. He believes in bringing people up not smashing them down. Look at how he has worked with the poor black kids and given them opportunity.

You miss the point entirely. It is not about which team represents the 99% - as no team does - not professional. The idea was to make comments supporting the 99% and slapping the 1% and doing it in a professional football = Superb owl format.